Children dressed as angels took part in a Catholic Christmas Eve mass at a church in Beijing last year. Estimates for the number of Christians in China range from the conservative official figure of 23 million to as many as 100 million by independent scholars, raising the possibility that Christians may rival in size the 85 million members of the ruling Communist Party.

Little help for China’s churchesRegarding the Jan. 12 cover story, “China’s church-state showdown”: It is not only the “house churches” that have endured China’s crackdown on the church. Even the registered Protestant congregations – churches that were once deemed invulnerable – have fallen prey to Beijing’s repressive human rights policies.

Despite monumental missionary successes in establishing churches, schools, and hospitals, the Chinese Communist Party has demonstrated little tolerance for “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). Now, more than 50 years later, there is little evidence that China’s modus operandi has changed.

Brian StuckeyDenver

The Net needs fast lanesRegarding the Jan. 21 online article “Does new Republican bill back Obama’s call for ‘open Internet’? Sort of.” (CSMonitor.com): There are good technical reasons to create Internet “fast lanes.” Some content (streaming videos, for example) needs to be delivered “on time” to allow smooth viewing, while other content (such as the second paragraph of an e-mail) can arrive hundreds of milliseconds later without there being any impact.

If regulations require that both be treated equally, the network must have a greater bandwidth to meet an unnecessary requirement, increasing the costs of the network.

The concern that network providers would give preferential treatment to their own content could be alleviated by a stipulation that they must provide access to their network (and fast lanes) to anyone who wants to pay the “toll” that the providers charge for their own content.
The reason that Netflix, Amazon, and Google support “net neutrality” is that they don’t want to pay for the bandwidth they are using. No one is suggesting that providers of servers should give start-ups free or reduced price computer services to support innovative new companies; why should network providers be required to do so?